Source: The Blogging Times

Boston-based TopTenSources, through its parent company Top10Media, raised $3.5 million in a venture round led by Highland Capital. The company also acquired Blogniscient, a blog news aggregator. No surprise that Halley Suitt is hatching plans, making deals.

Source: TechCrunch

It's a happy Halloween at Boston-based social news site Reddit. They've been acquired by Conde Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites for an undisclosed price. As happens with most successful tech startups in Boston, all four Reddit employees will relocate from Boston to San Francisco. Reddit will remain a standalone site and will operate under Wired Digital. Reddit, founded and funded in 2005, is a YCombinator company. YCombinator is an early-stage VC firm based in Cambridge. Like Digg, Reddit news stories are submitted and voted on by an active and loyal set of users.

Source: PDMA

Tomorrow through Friday the Product Development & Management Association will be hosting a delegation from the China Productivity Center (CPC), a Taiwanese government-sponsored organization for Taiwanese business leaders looking to stay ahead in the global market. They will be meeting at MIT and learning the ropes of innovative product development including getting comfortable with the fuzzy front end. That's the experimental, chaotic time in product development prior to knowing what you're actually creating. The seminar is considered groundbreaking as Taiwan is very production-oriented. Just think what would happen if they became innovative?

Related to innovation:
Stylists vs. Neanderthals
Innovate outside and in
Innovation drought?
Renovate, not innovate
Churn and burn R&D?

Source: Forbes

Photo originally uploaded by smuncky via Flickr

In 1990, almost 90 percent of the CEOs of the largest 100 companies served on outside boards. Today, that number has fallen below 60 percent. Intense scrutiny and new regulations aimed at curbing the trend of clubby, rubber-stamping, multi-board member CEOs, may have had an unintended negative effect. Active CEOs are arguably more experienced and talented - sought-after because their point of view is not hypothetical, but based on experience. Traditionally they've been the mainstay of the modern corporate board. Jim Drury writes that refomers need to know that "too much of a good thing is never a good thing."

Source: Ad Age

Dove knows why YouTube just sold for $1.65 billion. Their devastating viral video that shows how beauty is packaged and sold has been viewed more than 1.7 million times so far on YouTube. And it's brought in three times more traffic to CampaignForRealBeauty.com than Dove's Superbowl ad did last year. So not only does the Dove campaign work - bringing market share gains in four out of five product categories so far - but YouTube delivers.

Source: CNET

Put a video on YouTube and YouTube keeps every ad dollar your video generates. Want to keep those dollars? Try Cambridge-based Brightcove's new service that lets websites and video producers easily broadcast and sell videos and/or generate ad revenue. The service is free, but Brightcove keeps 50 percent of the ad revenue and 30 percent of product sales.

CNET says that in some ways Brightcove is the anti-YouTube. YouTube got big by letting the masses broadcast themselves or other stuff (apologizing later for any copyright violations). Now (post $1.65 billion) they're courting big media. But Brightcove started out with established media as customers, selling them software tools to broadcast videos online. Brightcove never courted the hoi polloi. Until today.

Related:
The TiVo-Brightcove end run
Brightcove opens the kimono
Brightcove serves up the Times
Future looks bright

Source: Wired

Who has the toughest tech job on the planet? My vote is Ray Ozzie. How's this for a to-do list? Step into Bill Gates' shoes. Turn Microsoft into a nimble web service company. Reinvent the corporate culture. Maintain and transform the Microsoft software business.

Wired says the switch to designing and launching software online is like telling an airline mechanic working in a hangar that he now has to maintain and fix planes...while they're in the air. I think that's the analogy for Ozzie too. He's the pilot and this is no flight sim. But he does seem to do it with professorial aplomb.

Here's an account from a Microsoft employee blogger who presented to Ozzie in India recently:

Unlike BillG, Ray didn't take any notes at all (though somebody with him did). When it was time to ask questions, I was stunned by Ray's depth of technical knowledge. He would go all guns blazing with questions like "Do you guys use technology X? What does it mean for Y? Have you guys thought about Z? Have you spoken to teams A, B and C who are doing a different form of X? ".

However, unlike Bill, Ray was always soft-spoken - even when he didn't like something, he was polite...but firm about it. I was impressed with his knowledge of the competitive landscape - he often knew of arcane features in some competitor's product - or in certain cases, competitors I hadn't heard of.

Brilliance. Vision. Commanding respect. That's what you want in a pilot, especially one that delivers some pretty chilling directives over the plane's intercom. Last fall his advice to the company was:

"Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration." Better, he went on, to "explore and embrace techniques to reduce complexity."

Yeah, he's telling the 700,000 Microsoft employees who have built some of the world's most bloated and complex software...to think simple. This will be the mother of all piloting attempts. Use the force...

Related:
Ozzie's Live drive
Mashup or meltdown for Microsoft?
The labs of Oz
Bi-coastal Ozzie
Ozzie goes to Redmond
Microsoft's cultural shift
Web 2.0 response
Microsoft comes alive

Source: Fortune

Fortune is reporting that Yahoo, now overshadowed by Google, may be flirting with AOL. A Yahoo- AOL merger would be a face-saver from Yahoo's Terry Semel, who was outflanked last year by Google when it swooped in to become AOL's search provider and got a 5 percent stake in AOL as part of the deal. What's killing Yahoo, the web's largest audience base? Status quo. They keep missing the big deals - MySpace, YouTube. Fortune sees it going one of 4 ways: Buy AOL, sell to Microsoft, merge with eBay or stay the course and be patient. What does your crystal ball say?

Karma capitalism
Illustration by James F. Kraus

Collective intellect
Death of the boob tube
Show me the money
Online Darwinism
Why Costco is addictive

Source: AdAge

Fast food is reacting to the wrath of the anti-transfat movement. Trying to lose the knickname Kentucky Fried Coronary, KFC is changing its cooking oil to cut trans-fat levels in half. But it still may not be enough to stop a lawsuit against the chain or citywide bans being proposed around the country. In June, Wendy's switched to trans-fat-free fries and chicken and has posted healthy sales since then. McDonald's claims to be testing trans-fat-free oils but is mum on future plans. As for me, you could fry popcorn "chicken" in liquid tofu and I still wouldn't eat it.

Related:
Disney goes healthy
No fast food for you
Mac and cheese me
Tastes like "chicken"
"Meat"
Evil goldfish
Big mother is watching
McDonalds, yoga and Philip Morris no smoking tips
The fat market

The Surviving Grady blog reminds us all that tonight, at 11:40pm, it's the anniversary of our 2004 World Series win. Let's all toast tonight.

Maureen Rogers blogging over at The Opinionated Marketers blog says that we have to give Major League Baseball marketers some credit.

"When it comes to working their brand, they sure don't leave any (head)stones unturned."

That's right, Sox fans, Maureen tells us we can now get a major league baseball-themed casket.

I think the marketing team in this scenario that's really working overtime are the casket marketers. They're trying to sell us sports caskets hoping that we don't go with the competition...

"In 2001, approximately 27% of deaths in the U.S. resulted in a cremation, up from just 6% in 1975. Current projections in the U.S. call for nearly 1 million cremations by 2010 with nearly half the population demonstrating – by 2025 – a preference for cremation at death." - Source

Yep, you're not putting me in the ground, Sox logo or no Sox logo. But enough about morbid topics...

In case you're not clear that social networks are the latest rage for startup business models, here are a few letters from readers asking us to take a look at theirs:

Kerri Connors writes about her company Body1 which has just received a patent from the People's Republic of China that centers on social networking and healthcare education. They're betting that if social networks are big here, just wait until you see what China will be like...

Martha Mendillo writes about a company she works with, Twango.

"Twango is a free web service which enables people to organize and share ALL of their digital media including pictures, video, audio, plus more than 100 other file types. In addition, Twango makes it easy for you to podcast your media, post pictures from your cell phone and republish to MySpace, a blog, a webpage...wherever you like."

Kristy Dahl writes about Squirl her startup in Portland, Maine that is a social network for collectors.

"Using our site, collectors of all interests can catalog, organize, and share their collectibles. We launched about two months ago and currently have users from around the world. The collections users have put up range in scope from coins and stamps to dead bugs and scrimshaw. In addition to its cataloging capabilities, Squirl offers many social networking features to help collectors connect to one another."

Anyone interested in or working in the Social Networking field, come on down to the Inaugural meeting of the Boston Social Media Club on November 2, 2006 — 6:00 - 8:30pm at the Colonnade Hotel Boston.

They'll be discussing these kinds of questions:

Can social media tools change the way marketers, consumers, organizations and journalists interact? What practices can individuals, institutions and corporations put in place now to better communicate ideas, benefits, opinions and needs?

Stan DeSantis reminds me that this week Mass High Tech held their All Star award ceremony honoring 12 influential and dynamic leaders from across New England's innovation economy.

Congratulations to this year's All Stars team:

• Vin Bisceglia, General Manager, Motorola, Inc. and Former Chairman and CEO, Broadbus Technologies Inc.
  
• Ray Cronin, CEO, Azimuth Systems Inc.
  
• Kedar P. Gupta, Co-founder and CEO, GT Solar Inc.
  
• John B. Landry, Chairman and CTO, Adesso Systems Inc.
  
• Robert Lanza, VP of Research and Scientific Development, Advanced Cell Technology Inc.
  
• Joseph E. McIsaac, CTO, Reflexion Network Solutions Inc.
  
• Richard K. Miller, President, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
  
• Lita Nelsen, Director, MIT Technology Licensing Office
  
• Richard A. Packer, President and CEO, Zoll Medical Corp.
  
• Pamela Reeve, Interim CEO, Boston's Wireless Task Force
  
• Nina F. Saberi, Founder and Partner, Castile Ventures
  
• James D. Shields, President and CEO, The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc.

If you were at Babson today you could have witnessed the 7th Annual Rocket Pitch Event where 108 new venture ideas, were each pitched in three minutes or less by Babson alumni and students.

My, aren’t we all enterprising this week?

And what's a week like without a Tom Curran comment?

Responding to my post about the addictive nature of Costco Tom says:

"Even though we live out near Worcester and both Sam's Club and BJ's are closer, we travel over an hour each way to go to the nearest Costco in Waltham! We have tried Sam's Club, but it just does not compare to the excellence of Costco. When we lived in northern California and had a Costco 10 minutes from our home we shopped there ALL the time. The number one rule of shopping at Costco - if you see something you like/want/need buy it then because it won't be there when you come back. It is better to buy and return than wait and lose out. It is a good thing their return policy is an excellent, no-hassle affair."

Don't forget to bring the forklift so you can bring home all that junk this weekend from Costco!

Source: PSFK

PSFK points us to New York-based startup Travelistic. They just launched a site that hosts travel videos that range from user uploads to professional content, and tourist board videos. Anyone can create profiles and upload video from their travels, tag it by keyword and geotag via GoogleMaps. That means it's all searchable by place or word. It's just getting started but it's a good idea. I perused the Uptown Art Car Parade in Minneapolis, Mayan cities in Guatemala.

This is the way I want to watch TV.

Related:
We want YouTube on TV
TV out, web video in
TV is so last generation
Watch CurrentTV
Can you name a TV network?
The reality TV of the Internet

This week while I've been on the road, I've had to use Internet Explorer. And it confirms how much I hate it and miss Firefox. Today when I get home I'm downloading the new Firefox. I've heard it rocks.

Source: Fortune

With $59 billion in sales from 488 locations, Costco is the fourth-largest retailer in the country and the seventh-largest in the world. The company has nearly 48 million members that that are slavishly devoted (averaging 22 trips per year), and surprisingly affluent (more than a third have household incomes over $75,000). So why is it so addicting? Savvy merchandising, product scarcity and a refusal to mark up anything more than 14 percent. Also no ad agency/brand frills - not even any shopping bags or nice signs. It's a formula that has the Mercedes set sitting in the parking lot waiting for the store to open.

Source: B2Day blog - newly renamed The Next Net blog

Erick Schonfeld blogs about comments from Piper Jaffray's Internet analyst Safra Rashtchy, who predicts that Google's strong growth and Yahoo and eBay's lack of growth are the direct result of "the increasing fragmentation of Internet sites and users' desire to frequent specialized vertical sites." This online Darwinism, could entirely change the landscape over the next five years, if existing players remain slow to react, both in commerce and in content and community." Schonfeld observes that as data becomes free and can live anywhere on the web, then the value of a single destination site to get everything that you need becomes less clear. "If information is power, and you start giving it away, then you should not be surprised if you end up with less power."

Source: TechCrunch

TechCrunch is reporting that Digg is in acquisition talks with a number of companies, including News Corp. But so far the company has been unable to land the $150 million they're looking for, so they will likely close a second round of financing instead. One issue? Digg claims 20 million unique monthly visitors and steep monthly growth, whereas the Comscore’s most recent September report shows only 1.3 million monthly unique visitors and flat growth since April.

Related:
Digg going deep
Digg moving map
The unimportance of Digg

Source: BusinessWeek

As companies operate in a global, interconnected business ecosystem, Indian philosophy is all the rage. Top business schools have introduced "self-mastery" classes that use Indian methods to help managers boost their leadership skills and find inner peace in lives dominated by work. And Indian-born strategists like C. K. Prahalad are among the world's hottest biz gurus. The major themes? Executives should be motivated by a broader purpose than money. Companies should take a more holistic approach to business - taking into account the needs of shareholders, employees, customers, society, and the environment. It's business as seen through karma. The Longer view. Greener.

Source: HipMojo via A VC

HipMojo makes a case that Google could boast a larger market cap than Microsoft by 2010. Fred Wilson summarizes his post: "If Microsoft cannot grow anymore and Google grows its top line at the rates analysts are predicting, and if their operating margins stay at 25%, and if the PE drops to mid 30s, it will happen. A lot of ifs there, but it's worth reading. Could be a peak into a crystal ball."

Source: Don Dodge's blog

Google has announced a new Custom Search Engine which allows anyone to create a vertical search engine on their site or blog. That means that you can select the websites that will be included in the Google search. Custom search engines are not new. What's new is that Google built in revenue sharing. Use Google Coop and you get a split of the ad revenue. Don Dodge says, "This is the thing that most technology people miss. It is not about the cool features and technical aspects...it is about the advertising revenue opportunity."

Source: CNN

Experts say the old-fashioned cathode-ray boob tube will soon be all but extinct. Sales of CRTs will fall from an estimated 14.4 million units this year to 10.4 million in 2007, while sales of LCD TVs are predicted to rise from 10.9 million units to 17.8 million. The decline comes despite the venerable CRT's bargain prices: $223, on average, compared with $1,007 for LCD or $2,335 for plasma. They're cool. They hang on the wall like a painting. They weigh less than a washing machine. 'Nuf said.

Related:
TV madness
Is plasma doomed?

Source: CNET

It used to be that Wall Street traders got their information from just a few elite sources - Bloomberg, news services. Now with blogs and tipster sites, critical information breaks out all over. Enter Collective Intellect, a company that combs through blogs, news sites, chat rooms and web sites and then surfaces rumors and news that might be of interest to traders or corporate public relations executives. The reality is that you can get all the information that they provide on your own...if you have time. Time for traders is money, literally - that's why they're willing to pay $45,000 a year for a 10-seat subscription.

Related:
Blogger analysts

Source: Life is Good

30,128. That's the number of pumpkins that were lit at the Life is Good Pumpkin Festival on Boston Common Saturday night. Not only did it break the Guinness Book of World Records, the event raised $250,000 for Camp Sunshine - a camp that helps children with life-threatening illnesses and their families. I went with my family and we added one more pumpkin to the cause.

There were 100,000 people there and I swear, everyone was happy. The people bringing in the pumpkins on forklifts, the people helping you find a spot to carve it, the people singing on stage, the Life is Good guys that kept track of how many pumpkins we were carving, and the thousands of wide-eyed children.

Before this festival I had a warm place in my heart for Life is Good. Their products embody values that I share - life can be tough, but it's also good. I like that their t-shirts and hats remind us about that fact. But after the festival, my respect for the company has increased dramatically.

They clearly get what their mission is and they understand brand. The festival embodied their brand - the choice of the charity, the metaphor of all those lights in the darkness, the sentiments on the signage, the community involvement, the friendliness and passion of the staff and volunteers, the fun and the happiness that the event inspired. It was flawless brand building.

The virtual news
Illustration by James F. Kraus

Blogger analysts
Candy for big media
Total recall?
The sky is falling
Disney goes healthy
YouTube for PowerPoint

I'm traveling to Glasgow this week for business so look for me to be posting at odd hours. Right now it's 3:55am in Boston but here it's already 8:55. Yeah, I've been flying all night. There's coffee and wifi though and so far I'm good to go.

Source: TechCrunch, C.C. Chapman

You've heard of virtual companies. Employees work where they are and use the Internet and phone to connect. But now even virtual companies can have an office. This week Business Filter reader C.C. Chapman will launch his new company - Crayon - on Second Life.

C.C. writes:

"crayon is a different kind of company that integrates the best of the consulting, agency, advisory, thought leadership and education worlds. The goal of crayon is to help clients make sense of these changes and tap into them in order to differentiate themselves from their competition, participate in community-driven conversations, and stand out from the crowd."

Sounds like they're aiming to be an agency that gets the social network/blog/2.0 jargon world. They're having a coming out party on Thursday at their office in Second Life. I've never been to a virtual coming out party, so I think I'll drop in and virtually meet C.C. I'll keep you posted.

Source: Tech Effect blog

Now that YouTube has passed out some candy to leading media companies, their next move is to dramatically follow through on their promise that if they're asked, they'll take something down. Today YouTube removed almost 30,000 videos that contain unauthorized materials taken from Japanese sources, including movies, music videos, and television, at the request of a number of Japanese rights-holders.

Luckily they still left important videos up, like the slow motion water balloon pop.

Many readers of Dah Filtah don't understand how come this blog doesn't have comments. I agree. But I have been promised that comments are coming. So for now, every Friday I do this weekly roundup of feedback to the blog.

This week I quoted David Armano as saying blogs are a place where we get to talk back. But Tom Curran points out:

"Most blogs I read, including yours, don't allow comments. So how does the talking back take place? By having another blogger link back to your blog? That is hardly an effective feedback loop. For all practical purposes, blogs are really nothing more than a one-way means of communicating your "message" to your audience. That is just my 2 cents."

Hmm...I still think blogs are way different than reading an article in the paper. But comments - or meet-ups to further the discussion in the real world - like I did this week at Digitas - really does complete the circle.

Tom also weighs in on my post about YouTube's revenue secret saying:
Source:

I would be willing to bet the back-of-a-napkin $7.5M/month is a, shall we say, optimistic figure. Even so, that only works out to $90M/year. Evaluate that against the $1.65B Google plunked down for them and you still have a grotesquely poor ROI. I'm sure Google bought YouTube for the page views to get to the ad-clicks that will generate, but then one still has to wonder how many ads and over what period of time it will take to recover their investment?

Yep. Time will tell.

Referencing my post on the Netflix Crowdsourcing Contest, Kyle Austin points us to the Hacking Netflix blog which posted about ChoiceStream, a Cambridge-based company that "issued a press release to claim that they have a better approach to movie recommendations (an interesting way to get the attention of a potential customer)."

Danita Blackwood invites us to participate in a free live webcast for business owners on Tuesday, October 24th.

"If you’re a woman business owner dreaming of taking your business to the million dollar mark, this is the event for you. Brought to you by Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence and Founding Partner, Open from America Express®, The Make Mine A $Million Dollar Business Program has been compared to American Idol meets the Apprentice. 20 new women business owners will be awarded with a package of money, mentoring, marketing and technology tools to help propel their businesses into million dollar companies.

Maria Gonzalez invites us to try Willitfly.com, "support site where business professionals can find out instantly if they're up to standard for important business tasks. And if they're not up to standard, the same technology that helps them understand where the bar is placed quickly transfers knowledge and provides the support they need...when they need it."

Jon Boutelle, the CTO of Slideshare wrote after my post called YouTube for Powerpoint - "We're going to be launching for real this time (open to the public) next week."

Now that food is the new smoking, that doesn't mean smoking is out of the news.

On the one hand, this software is built to scare teens straight about the adverse effects of smoking.
- via The Raw Feed

Whereas, this business is taking the concept of a separate smoking section to a whole new level...by giving them their own airline. Smintair - Smoker's International Airways "will not offer economy-class tickets, but will target business people who enjoy smoking." OKaaaaaay.
- via Fresh Inc.

Source: CNN

"Six geeks + one laboratory + 24-hour workdays = success. That's the formula at Squid Labs, one of a growing number of small businesses generating innovative new products for complex scientific problems." With large companies increasingly slashing their R&D budgets, demand for companies like Squid Labs, Intellectual Ventures, Mom Inventors and Walker Digital is rising to unprecedented levels. Invention is not an easy business. The competition is steep and international.

"Of the record 409,532 patent applications filed last year, more than 45 percent came from abroad, continuing a steady trend that has seen U.S. inventors lose ground to their overseas counterparts."

Related:

Squid Labs on How to Solve Sudoku every time
Don't outsource your cool

Source: Grant McCracken's blog

Grant McCracken posted his ideas on Rachael Ray, one of my favorite foodies. Last year I wrote about the launch of her magazine. If you haven't seen Ray on TV, think of her as the anti-Martha Stewart. She's "warm, improvisational, unassuming, peppery."

McCracken says Ray isn't really selling people on how to cook, she's selling people on the idea of "food that turns into a "meal," meals that turn into "events," events that turn into a "family." McCracken says, "in the pre-Rachael era, the food category was about food." But instead, Ray "has turned her persona (brand) into a celebration of why food matters."

Related thought:

David Armano recently said that the best blogs require that the blogger have three qualities:

Empathy. Experience. Curiosity.

Ethnographer/Economist/Anthropologist and blogger Grant McCracken has got those qualities in spades. I'm usually rewarded with great food for thought when I visit his blog.

Source: Slate

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that last week, Google bought the one-year-old company, YouTube, for $1.65 billion. And if you read this blog, you know I'm good for at least one YouTube post per day. So today here's a great little video slide show from Slate that helps you understand the major YouTube milestones. Plus, it's Friday - so why not see that History of Dance video one more time?

Source: Frank Barnako's Media Blog

Following the Rocketboom model of pretty, smart, funny girl delivering the "news," Wallstrip is a daily show that highlights one public company each day. Today it's Adobe day. The videos are short, funny and snarky. Frank Barnako says it's unclear who the audience is for this niche content - but founder Howard Lindzon hopes it will attract investment-minded 20-somethings and the advertisers that want to reach them.

Source: Wall Street Journal (free article)

Walt Mossberg says Internet Explorer 7.0 is an improvement, but don't even bother if you're already using Firefox. Which I am. In the meantime, Firefox has launched a beta of its version 2.0 browser. Get it here.

How is IE doing against Firefox?

"Some estimates have Firefox adoption at about 12% to 14%, others have it as high as 27%. Meanwhile, IE usage has been reported as being as low as about 75% or 62%, having once been as high as 92%." - Computer Business Review (UK)

Source: PaidContent

And now for my daily YouTube posting. This time it's about YouTube's strategy for staving off copyright infringement lawsuits. Namely, give them a piece of the pie. Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG each received a small stake in YouTube as part of content deals with the video sharing company. The three could receive a total of $50 million from Google’s acquisition of the company. This has something to do with why Universal recently sued Grouper and Bolt.com for copyright infringement, instead of YouTube.

Why is YouTube the anointed one? Because it is the fastest growing website in history. How did it get so big so fast? Because it's simple-simple-simple. See below.

Related:
A grand unified theory of YouTube and MySpace
Easy is the new hard
Less is more
Time to enjoyment metric
Howard Stern as father of Web 2.0

Source: apophenia blog

Dana Boyd is a PhD student at Berkeley. She has a great blog on the topic of social media and other things. She points us to this video from the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. She asks, "The images of perfection we're sold are a fabrication. Most of us know this at some level, but do we really get it?" Watch the video. I think your answer will be no, I really didn't get it, until now.

Source: BusinessWeek TechBeat blog

TechDirt hopes to fill the void between broad consumer testing firms and traditional analyst firms such as Gartner and Forrester with its new service called the TechDirt Insight Community, which matches bloggers and companies in a feedback loop. The service will be double-blind so companies can put forward questions without revealing competitive intelligence and bloggers can feel free to offer honest opinions. Bloggers set the price - around $50-100 per post per blogger - and Techdirt packages them up, pricing the bundle so it can make some profit. Sounds very win-win. Interesting.

Source: i, Cringely

YouTube happily let all of us think that they were broke when really they were doing about $7.5 million per month against expenses of less than $2 million. Really? Well, that's what a blogger named Froosh posted recently after doing some back of a napkin numbers. The real numbers are likely different. But the reality is they’re doing better than breaking even. Where is the money coming from? Banners and contextual ads. Cringely says, "YouTube is less a video-sharing site than it is a social networking site based around video. The company gets its content for free and has built a profitable business from acting as a video portal."

Source: CNN

Gordon Bell, a researcher for Microsoft, is working on creating a backup for your brain - a device that can remember everything in your life from the smallest of details to your most memorable moments. The only problem, it seems to me, is that it consumes your whole life recording your life like that. Sunil Vemuri at QTech is doing something a little more manageable. He's transforming "smart phones into tools for jogging your memory by integrating your conversations and verbal notes" into your daily life." Both technologies raise big concerns about privacy. But even bigger - this stuff still won't help you remember where you left your car keys.

Source: Micropersuasion

Steve Rubel warns startups that the sky might be falling. An analysis by Blackfriars Communications shows that actual ad spending overall this year is down from original estimates. And while researchers thought 10 percent of all ad spending this year would go online, only 7 percent did. On top of that, Google is grabbing 25 percent of all online ad dollars. This spells trouble for the glut of ad-dependant startups. Rubel says, "If you're a startup, now would be a good time to roll out your backup plan."

Source: BoingBoing

In a big win for the nutrition movement and with the potential for far-reaching ripple effects for the food industry, Disney has announced that they won't license its characters to sugary food-products or those that contain trans-fats. They've also pledged to clean up the food in Disney theme parks. The guidelines take effect immediately for new licensing deals and will be phased in over time for existing deals like McDonald's Happy Meals, Keebler and Kelloggs which has seven years left on their deal. I notice that Tony the Tiger is alive and well on the Disney site right now.

Related:

No fast food for you
Mac and cheese me
Tastes like "chicken"
"Meat"
Evil goldfish
Big mother is watching
McDonalds, yoga and Philip Morris no smoking tips
The fat market

Source: BusinessWeek

The media land grab has begun - for virtual news on Second Life. Reuters just set up a bureau there complete with a flesh and blood veteran tech reporter Adam Pasick as its full-time bureau chief. Yep. Full time. Which is pretty ironic, given that reporters covering the real world are being downsized on a regular basis. CNET has a Second Life office and recently, so does Wired magazine.

The Second Life audience is approaching 1 million, and growing at about 38 percent month over month. With 200,000 to 250,000 new (young early-adopter) members expected to join in October alone, no surprise that media, advertisers and anyone looking to tap into the recently estimated $400,000+ spent by Second Life members in a 24 hour period.

If reporters are going virtual, what's next? Join the discussion.

Related:
Second Life going mainstream
Trendy clothier gets Second Life
Virtual world makes the cover
Naughty virtual neighbors

David Armano from Digitas has a blog called Logic+Emotion. In 8 months it has achieved a Technorati ranking in the 6000's with over 300 blogs linking back to it. That's akin to an overnight success in the blog world. When I first blogged about an Armano topic, it was one of the first times "mainstream media" covered him. Since, he's been picked up by BusinessWeek. Armano is holding a series of internal presentations called "A blog's eye view," at Digitas and yesterday invited a few guests to their swank Boston office, including me, Ann Handley of MarketingProfs and Peter Kim of Forrester.

As Peter Kim blogged after the event, "agencies have particular pressure to get ahead of the curve and help clients capture value from the medium." Armano's advice? Learn about the medium authentically by creating, reading or commenting on blogs.

"Blogs talk to people openly, sincerely and authentically - and we get to talk back."

I read Armano's blog because of his candor, style and intelligent observations. Digitas seems to agree. They've encouraged Armano's blog all along and Armano, who is new to Digitas, joked at the start, "If you want to get a promotion, start a blog." It looks like he's an overnight success at Digitas too.

Update 12:15EST:
Ann Handley has a great write up on Armano's talk that discusses and expands on David's blog advice.

Source: GigaOm

Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E Cheese has opened the first in his new chain of tech cafés in Woodland Hills, California. At the uWink Bistro customers play games and order food from networked touch-screen tables. Katie Fehrenbacher says it sounds a little too Max Headroom 80's style for her. For me, it sounds a little too Cybersmith. Inspired by his belief that games can ease social interaction, Bushnell has spent $10 million and over four years on uWink.

Source: Red Herring

Researchers at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have launched what they hope will become the Google of drug discovery. Called the Connectivity Map, the free search engine compares the genomic signatures of 164 drugs and then cross maps them with the genomic signatures of diseases. Their goal? To match diseases with potential treatments, and to suggest how drugs can be applied in new ways to treat diseases like cancer.

Source: CNET

...for a few days, that is. Howard Stern's four-hour-plus show will be made available live online at no charge for two days, October 25 and 26, to promote a new Internet-only version of Sirius radio. The new service offers more than 75 channels of CD-quality programming over the Internet - without the need to buy a Sirius satellite receiver - for a monthly subscription fee of $12.95.

If you're keeping score:
Sirius subscribers: 5.12 million
Howard Sterns audience on terrestrial radio: 12 million
XM radio subscribers: 7.2 million

Source: Inc.com

Ever needed to share a slideshow with someone and then run into the problem of having to send an enormous PowerPoint file as an attachment? Then when their email server rejects it, you have to chop it up into pieces or send a DVD in - egad! - snail mail? Well no more. Slideshare is a new beta web application that make sharing PowerPoint presentations online as easy as sharing video clips on YouTube.

David Armano from the Logic+Emotion blog used Slideshare to show a draft of the slides he's presenting this morning at Digitas Boston.

Café work etiquette
Illustration: James F. Kraus

Cranberry bog strategy
Pantone does paint
Placeshift your startup
Crowdsourcing contest
Don't live in your in-box
Actual is new virtual

Full disclosure, right up front. I'm working on a part of the (PRODUCT) RED campaign.

Lucky me.

The (RED) Manifesto states:

"All things being equal, they are not. As first world consumers we have tremendous power. What we collectively choose to buy, or not buy, can change the course of life and history on this planet."

(RED) is not a charity. It's a business model. You buy (RED) stuff from the GAP, Armani, Converse, Apple, or Motorola and a portion of the money goes to Africa to help eliminate AIDS. Simple and powerful.

And it's shaping up to be a model global launch. The Oct. 9th New Yorker has RED GAP ads throughout, including an inside front cover pic featuring Stephen Spielberg in a RED leather jacket. And today on Oprah, Oprah and Bono will officially kick everything off by launching the (RED) iPod.

As for me, I'm working on (RED) WeeMees for AOL Instant Messenger.

Related:

Related:
The business of philanthropy
Google.org vs. Gates Foundation
Google Who's Who: Larry Brilliant
Bill, Melinda and Bono

I'm harvesting RED in the real and virtual worlds today. And so are Bono and Oprah - or as Engadget calls them, Bonoprah.

Before I run down all the reader mail and links, here's a shout out for all of the wonderful emails I got from regular readers about the recent passing of my Dad. The best part about blogging are the human connections that happen. Thanks for being there.

Amanda Hoffman from Zillow writes about a post on the Zillow blog in which Jeff Somers pines away for Boston, his hometown, and analyzes Zillow trends in Boston neighborhood housing valuations.

"What did surprise me a bit was the nearly 16% jump in the Zindex for Central Boston; which propelled that area from the eighth most expensive in Boston to the third (vaulting past both Jamaica Plain and Charlestown among others)."

Ben D. writes that he likes the concept of the laws of the 3rd space and links us to a collective for work-from-homers called The Hat Factory in San Francisco. They charge a day rate of $10 and a monthly rate of $170. Now THAT’S some low overhead.

Ben comments:

"I think this model could definitely be reproduced in some of the neighborhoods in Boston/Cambridge/Somerville where cafes are more "3rd spaces" than places for the rest of us to get a cup of jo!"

Michael Chmura writes to remind me about the Forum on Entrepreneurship and Innovation being held today. Great names on the speaking docket: Craig Benson, Founder of Cabletron Systems, Tom Stemberg, Founder of Staples Inc., Jay Adelson, CEO of digg, George Bell, Venture Partner of General Catalyst, and Dale Strang, General Manager of Fox Interactive Media. Wish I could be there!

Mark Balding writes to say he recently had a difficult time with an IT outsource provider and he wants our help.

"I wonder if others have had the same, and if there is any common wisdom that could be shared to prevent others from getting into such a situation?"

Have any advice to share? Send it to me and I'll post it next Friday.

Dan Gallagher writes to link us to Stoneham-based TR3 Solutions who is helping the fresh spinach/salad industry to improve their product quality and consumer experience through innovative use of RFID technology. "Important news in light of the recent e-coli scares."

From the press release:

"Fresh Express will be using TR3's On-Demand solution for promotions, sales and supply chain visibility, plus TR3's Perishables Module that adds capabilities for products sold with expiration dates. TR3 On-Demand processes the information read from RFID tags at several major retailers, including Wal-Mart, and alerts Fresh Express to key issues such as supply chain bottlenecks and, if necessary, to better execute recalls."

And here's my usual list of random links I picked up this week:

I'm a huge Charlie Rose watcher. I have even purchased Charlie Rose episodes from iTunes. This week I visited Rose's site and noticed he's screening recent shows via Google Video and that he plans to rev his site soon.

Check out the geeky license plates
- via popURLS

Panicked chefs propose copyrighted food Oh brother.
- via BoingBoing

Source: Slate

China is cracking down on leg-lengthening surgery. What? OK, apparently China is a very height-conscious society. So in the race to get ahead and climb the ladder, young professionals are dabbling in a surgery designed to repair accident damage or remedy dwarfism that "involves breaking the patients' legs and stretching them on a rack." Recovery takes 2 years and at least 10 patients have been disfigured. Wow.

Source: Ad Age

Here comes Enviga - a sparkling green-tea drink from Coca-Cola and Nestle that boosts metabolism. The marketing director lays it out this way. "There's calorie, low-calorie, zero-calorie, and now we offer consumers negative-calorie products." And the chief scientist for Coca-Cola says that "extensive scientific studies" show that three cans a day of Enviga will burn a net average of 60 to 100 calories. If you believe the spin, tank up in New York City on Nov. 5th and nationwide in February.

Do you buy the spin? Join the discussion.

Related:
Coke on the rocks
Pop goes the soda
Soda going flat
The tea counterculture
The fat market

Tangentially related:
Soda vs. Pop map
Mexican Coke
Soda mags

Source: Slate

Daniel Gross writes about The Blue Fund, a mutual fund that invests in companies that have policies and worldviews that jibe with the Democratic Party. It's currently outperforming the S&P 500 and the Free Enterprise Action Fund a mutual fund that uses stock ownership to push policies associated with the Republican Party. The funds founder chalks up their success to investing in progressively-led innovative companies that are more likely to understand brand, earn loyal customers, be flexible, and treat their employees well.

Their screening process "seems to sift out the small number of American companies that cater to iPod-listening, Nike-wearing, latte-drinking, Internet-surfing, Costco-shopping people with lots of discretionary income and fat 401(k) plans."

Yep, that would be blue state, coastal, urban Democrats.

Source: 43 Folders via Digg

Lately I've been feeling overwhelmed with email and things to do. So Merlin Mann's post on "no-duh" ways to immediately improve your life was a good thing to read. He calls them super-obvious, but when you get inundated, it's easy to forget things like...reduce noise and distractions, write things down, focus on getting things done and most importantly, be picky about what you work on and don't live in your inbox...set aside time away from email to actually work.

Source: Wired

Feel really identified with your avatar in Second Life? Me neither. But for those of you that are, Fabjectory is ready to sell you a real world tchotchke for your Second Life alter-ego. But it's going to cost you. The 3- to 7-inch statuettes go for between $100 and $200. They've sold almost a dozen already and they've only been at it for a few weeks. But if you're not into polymer statues, you could try to talk the people at Whoopass Enterprises. Then you'd be the first on your virtual block to have a look-alike bobble head for your avatar.

Source: Fortune

MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath

Sumner Redstone may be Viacon's top dog but the company's biggest brands are run by women. In fact, Viacom has produced more prominent women leaders than any other company since Fortune launched its Most Powerful Women list in 1998. The current who's who? MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath, Nickelodeon chief Cyma Zarghami, BET Networks boss Debra Lee, Paramount Pictures president Gail Berman and Stacey Snider who just took charge at DreamWorks SKG. And in the past Viacom has employed Walt Disney's Anne Sweeney, retired Paramount chairman Sherry Lansing, Oxygen Media CEO Gerry Laybourne and Lifetime Entertainment Services CEO Betty Cohen.

Source: BusinessWeek

Originally uploaded by Jeffrey Beall via Flickr

In the third quarter only eight venture-backed companies managed to go public. Why? Take Boxborough-based Broadbus Technologies. With financials ripe for an IPO, the board feared institutional investors might not take the risk that Broadbus could compete with bigger companies, and knowing VCs would not re-up, they sold out to Motorola for $186 million. Potential innovations can get stripped out via mergers and with VCs avoiding high-risk investments (still gun-shy from the last bubble), there is a rising concern that innovation is being stifled across the board.

Source: CNN/Money

Is Google-YouTube the beginning of the end of the latest dot.com craze, or will it mark the beginning of a new slew of media acquisitions? CNN/Money runs down the latest analyst and industry jive about what could happen. But everyone seems to agree that $1.65 billion valuation was surprisingly huge for "a 67-person company in an unproven market that hasn't made any money." The pressure is probably highest for Yahoo (the yellow falling line on the chart) who now feels breath on its neck from a wide array of rivals.

Source: TechDirt

A week ago, Netflix offered a million dollars to anyone who can improve the accuracy of their movie recommendation engine. TechDirt admits it wasn't sure if people would really do it, since only the best takes home the prize. But a week later? 8,000 teams have signed on to participate. And apparently one group has made a ton of progress and has already bested Netflix's own efforts. Check out the leaderboard. Sounds like it's shaping up to be a crowdsourcing case study.

Related:
Crowdsourcing
How to work with crowds
Tapping your quiet genius

Source: Industrial Brand Creative blog

If you understand that the acronym PMS doesn't just refer to a woman's health issue, then you've used a Pantone color book. And if you know Pantone, you'll be happy to know they're practicing good brand extension. When you want paint in EXACTLY that PMS color? Now we can get it. Choose from over 3,000 c